Misery Loves Company and I Ain't Got a Ride to Your Pity Party

This has been a week of reflection for me  It is a week where I found myself waxing philosophic in my head and then voicing my thoughts to other people. I am not one of those "quote" people who walk through life spouting off Walt Whitman or Henry David Thoreau passages to every passing ship in the night. Maybe I am feeling my age or worse yet, maturity is getting the best of me. Somebody might say, "well, that's a good thing!" I don't know, I am not sure I want to grow up yet. Frankly, this week has shown me that this world is absolutely full of miserable people and I know for a fact that I am not one of them, nor do I want to be. However, my patience is wearing awfully thin for the whiners, complainers, poormouthers, the envious, the rude, and the outright mean individuals that I come across every single day. Those who follow the George Costanza routine of "look angry and shuffle papers on your desk." Just the other day, and I kid you not, I told someone, "Man, it's a nice sunny day today!" His response:

"I don't know, I kinda wish it was raining."

Hey Eeyore, I am about to send you to the damn glue factory. Ugh.

In any event, I press on. "I rage against the dying of the light," as Dylan Thomas so eloquently puts it. (see, waxing philosphic!) Life is too short to be miserable and it's definitely too short to let other miserable people drag you down into their shame spiral (+1 for Clueless reference....yeah, I like that movie, sue me). Some people are beyond rehabilitation and their world crashes every day. They simply want company in their own personal Apocalypse and I ain't read a thing about that in the Revelation, so leave me out of it.

I remember at Cass Grocery, we had our share of moments that drove us nuts, either collectively or individually. Some were warranted: shoplifting, bitching too much about prices, using our restroom and leaving it resembling Chernobyl ten minutes after the nuclear plant exploded. Then there were trivial things that customers would do that would just absolutely get under my skin and it would ruin the next few hours because I would dwell on it. For example:

1) Getting a six pack of beer and not closing the cooler door all the way
2) Picking up a Snickers, deciding against it, and putting it in the Reeses Pieces box
3) Leaving a used coffee stirring stick on the counter
4) Watching me make a sandwich or a hot dog and say "that's too much mustard" or "put some more lettuce on there."
5) Dropping a 20 ounce plastic Coke, getting another one, and putting the ticking time bomb back in the cooler for the next guy to get victimized

 People who accomplished the above tasks (some people could do 2-3 of them in one visit to the store) were scum to me. I would just boil watching them, thinking of how much I wanted to rake their shins with my Air Jordans. To the teenage me, this was all akin to the following:

1) Voting for George McGovern for President
2) Kicking a box of lab puppies or my Trapper Keeper's velcro finally wearing out
3) Cheering for Georgia Tech or Florida on purpose
4) That POS Jeff stealing Kelly Kapowski from Zack before prom
5) Leaving my giant Sony boombox, containing my cassette single of Collective Soul's "December," in the rain

I had my reasons, mind you. Leaving the cooler door open was pure lackadaisical slackness at its worst. Pee Wee, Pee Wee Junior, Tony, Dale, Doc, Debbie, Rudy, George, and Fufu had to buy that beer too. They did not want their Olde English 800 "Forty" or 12 pack of Natty Ice to be room temperature.

**Natty Ice was the alpha and omega of beers to rural Georgians back then. It was 5.9% alcohol, which was the highest possible alcohol content allowed in Georgia at the time. "Whew boy, this stuff will get you druuuuuuuunk!" Little did they know that across the big pond, Trappist monks in Belgium were making beers with 13% alcohol. I could see a road trip now: Cedar Creek Road does Brussels. We would have those Belgians screaming profanity at Sterling Marlin and have a domestic violence charge on their record in no time flat.

Putting candy in the wrong box and the coffee stirring stick on the counter was close behind. It was just one more thing for me to do that wasted my time. People watching me make their sandwich or hot dog and critiquing my artwork really irked me. Would you stand over Leonardo Da Vinci while he painted the Mona Lisa and say, "Her smile is a little too coy."? No. You would not. Preparing the chili dog to perfection is a skill acquired over time. Nobody could concoct the perfect artery clogging, gut bomb like I could. Keep your eyes off the canvas while the artist works, please. Leaving a freshly dropped 20 ounce Coke in the cooler was just plain mean. Not only would it explode all over the person buying it, it would be all over my floor (which I would have to clean) and I would have to give them a free one for the trouble. You just cost us 4 cents and gave me another opportunity to mop.....if I had a voodoo doll, I would have thrown it in the meat slicer and flipped the switch.

See? Aren't you angry yet? Don't you want to find these people and rip them a new one? Reliving these things makes me want to......do nothing. Why? Because that is stupid and I choose to recall other things. Like the loyalty of our customer base, which includes the people who left cooler doors open. Those same people would tell a joke that would crack us up or lay drag on Cassville Road just to appease us. The people who left coffee stirring sticks on the counter and candy in the wrong box put me through college. The people watching me make their hot dog? They taught me to have thicker skin. Those who chose to leave a dropped 20 ounce Coke in the cooler? They showed me that nobody is perfect and sometimes you just have to accept people for what they are. I recall one day, I was ranting about something trivial to Billy and he said "you whine like a damned whipped mule, boy. You ain't got nothin to worthwhile to whine about." I am unaware of the sound made by a whipped mule, but it did not sound too good. You always learned a good lesson at Cass Grocery, whether by choice or by chance.

So, the point is, be happy. Stop finding every fault, every shortcoming, every little inconvenience in your life and beating yourself and everyone else to death with it. It is not interesting, it is not productive and you can't call it "venting" to mask what is really whining and bitching. Believe me, I beat several people over the head with my BS this week. I am over it. I have a Belgian restaurant nearby that has some of the good Trappist monk beer anyway. I could go over there and share a pint with some nice people. Although, the convenience store on 78th has a special on Natty Ice right now. I might just turn back the clock and indulge, call up a replay of the 1993 Daytona 500, turn on some Collective Soul and Rebel Yell everytime Ernie Irvan circles the track.